The days of the rock concert ticket are numbered. Guns N' Roses' show at the Hammersmith Apollo on June 7 is being touted as the world's first ticketless gig. Unless they specifically ask for a small piece of card, fans will be expected to arrive bearing barcodes sent to their mobile phones as text messages. A couple of weeks later, the same thing will happen on a much bigger scale at the O2 Wireless Festival in Hyde Park.

It's bad news for people who are apt to delete their texts by mistake. But it's also a shame in a wider sense. Ever since rock first rolled, tickets have been the acceptable face of souvenir syndrome. The merchandise sellers grow steadily more bloated and ruthless, hawking fleeces and hoodies, stetsons and dolls, £15 programmes and £50 sweatshirts, but you can ignore them because the best memento is already in your pocket.

Tickets are humble, democratic, unpretentious. And they do the job, twice over: afterwards, they transport you back to the show as efficiently as they got you into it in the first place. Memory needs only a jog and there's something magical about the way a clerical little item can conjure up a pulsating night.

To say I collect them would be an exaggeration. It's more a case of not throwing them away, shoving them into a drawer, waiting a few years and then, in a spasm of efficiency, transferring them to an envelope. Much has been written about how men of a certain age, especially rock fans, tend to be nerds and list-makers. What tends to be forgotten is that the nerd gene coexists with the layabout gene, the haven't-quite-got-round-to-it gene, and the other defining traits of our great gender.

So the ticket habit is haphazard. The first one I ever proudly clutched, for the Boomtown Rats at the Rainbow in 1977, isn't there. Which is appropriate, because when my friend Paddy and I emerged at Finsbury Park tube station, we realised the tickets were still at home. There wasn't time to go back, so we had to buy them all over again. It was worth it because (a) we were 15, and (b) Bob Geldof was brilliant, full of demented energy. But both my tickets have mysteriously evaporated, like some of Geldof's bandmates.

My earliest surviving ticket is actually a stub, plain and yellow, which could almost have come from a raffle. When did doormen start taking the stub rather than the main bit of the ticket? The evidence of the envelopes suggests it was circa 1980-82. The stub is from Talking Heads at the Hammersmith Palais in 1980, a fabulous show at which a nervy art-punk band grew into a hefty funk collective, reversing the whole drift of rock history by turning a white sound into something black. The support band was a name to conjure with as well: U2. Unfortunately they were too lowly to be mentioned on the ticket, or to interest my girlfriend and me and our two friends. We spent their set having a drink in the bar, which we felt was the sophisticated way to deal with support acts.

The 1982 ticket is from my first mega-gig, the Rolling Stones at Wembley. This was back when the Stones still had some rarity value, and Wembley still had a stadium. The ticket cost £10.50, which was steep; Roxy Music, playing Wembley Arena the same summer, charged £7.50. But then Roxy didn't have the J Geils Band on the bill with them. The Roxy ticket pointed the way ahead for big gigs by mentioning a sponsor. It was Levi's, improbably, since Roxy made a point of not wearing jeans; maybe the tuxedo manufacturers didn't have the same spending power.

The Stones ticket was dead plain, without so much as a panted tongue. When they returned eight years later, the ticket was quite different: tongue logo in two colours, a name for the tour (Urban Jungle, whatever that meant), copious watermarks, and a silver W for Wembley logo. Tickets had fallen into the hands of the marketing department. They had lost some innocence, and become a vehicle for branding.

My impression from hundreds of gigs since was that this trend continued and accelerated. It certainly has done in some of rock's many mansions. Live Aid, in 1985, had what was then a standard Wembley Stadium ticket showing an outline of the twin towers. The ticket for Live 8, 20 years later, was glossy, full-colour and twice the size, with its Africa-as-a-guitar emblem. Stars who used to settle for a slim piece of card with their name in crisp typewriterish capitals have moved on to logos and even pictures of themselves. For her first visit to Wembley Arena, in 2000, Britney Spears had a plain ticket; for her second, in 2004, she offered a portrait - pneumatic, bare-navelled and wearing a tweed hat at a jaunty angle - that my teenage self would have found endlessly absorbing.

The ticket design is no guide to the quality of the show, except perhaps inversely. Britney was good fun the first time, hopeless the second. The Stones were less compelling in 1990 than 1982, but through no fault of their own. The 1990 show coincided with England playing Germany in a World Cup semi-final, so the crowd was distracted and the evening doomed to anticlimax. A gig has to feel as if it's the only place to be.

Cher produced a lavish ticket at Wembley in 1999, and a cheesy, unengaging performance. But Radiohead had a showy ticket at Tredegar in 2000, a sly pastiche of a Victorian circus bill, and the gig itself was great. And the White Stripes, at Alexandra Palace in 2004, had a rather worrying self-portrait ticket, a sort of Cher with added irony, yet they still performed with nonchalant intensity.

The most moving concert I've been to was Brian Wilson performing Pet Sounds in 2002, with a blend of sadness and fun, innocence and damage, that had half the crowd in tears. The ticket was functional to a fault, with Wilson's name dwarfed by that of the Festival Hall. This month, there was a similar combination from Bruce Springsteen and his exhilarating folk-jazz band at Hammersmith. It's rare for a plain ticket to go with a bad show, but Joss Stone managed a shocker at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in 2004.

Holograms are the thing at the moment, as part of a trend towards tighter security, or deeper paranoia. But while ticket prices move in one direction only - the Stones are getting away with £150 now - the designs can go the other way. As long ago as 1983, David Bowie had a full-colour photo-ticket for the mainstream-but-memorable Serious Moonlight tour in Milton Keynes. For the infamous Glass Spider shows in 1987, he had just a logo; for the equally derided Tin Machine tour of 1989, elegant silhouettes; on four much stronger tours since, nothing visual at all. Bowie never was one to go with the flow.

These days, there's a different kind of free souvenir to be had. The air at gigs is thick with camera phones. You can spend the whole evening taking small blurred pictures of ant-like figures being outshone by their own lights. Or you can relax, enjoy the show and keep the ticket.